THANKFUL FRIDAY

Rainbow road

22 Likes, 0 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Rainbow road"

I dreamed I had a pet octopus. He was tiny and his name was Charlie. I got him from a kiosk at a mall. It was one of those operations where you build the habitat and then stick an animal in it. I was really mad about the size of the box I had to work with, but I put some white sand in the container with a nice rock. Then the attendant plucked a small pink octopus out of a tank full of octopus and placed it in my container. I gave Michael a solum look and said “He is going to die if we don’t move him into something better than this.” We took Charlie home where he then escaped his container and disappeared. I woke up before finding him dead or alive. I can only hope that Charlie found his way back to the ocean. All the way from Missouri.

I’ve a had a few people checking in with me this week what with it being Chris’s birthday, soon to be followed up with the anniversary of his death. Michael and I have so much on our calendars that we actually printed out the months of February and March and stuck them to our fridge. We’ve written in all of the things and we add things when necessary. I put Chris’s birthday and his death day on the calendar. I did this because every year Michael says something about not knowing the dates and wishing he knew the dates. I don’t want to be constantly reminding him because every time I do, it’s a reminder to me. And by golly, I KNOW those dates and I do not need the reminder. I also don’t want special treatment. I don’t want to be tip-toed around. I just want to go about my daily life, take a moment to be a little sad and swear at Chris for being dead, and move forward.

I am not pretending or protesting too much when I say that I am in a really really good place this year. My meditation practice is solid and consistent. I am not just being responsible for my own happiness, I am taking charge of my own happiness in fact, I’m putting it on the top of my list of things I need to take charge of. I have taken some chances that I did not ever see myself taking like teaching workshops and showing my photography in a space other than my own home. These are things that I never would have volunteered to do, nor are they things that I would have thought would bring me so much joy.

I am Charlie and I am escaping my tiny space for the big wide world.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Blinding Fall

See this Instagram photo by @elephant_soap * 2 likes

A few weeks back, I ran across some words of wisdom from Tao Porchon-Lynch, the world's oldest living yoga teacher. Seriously. Go check out her pictures. I'll wait. Gah! Isn't she the cutest thing you've ever seen?!?! I just want to scoop her up and carry her around in my pocket. Please, can I be just like her when I'm 98? Any way...there was a small little article about her in Well and Good where she gave three tips for happiness. Now, I will admit that her advice is not something I haven't already heard before. Don't dwell on the bad things that might happen. Don't judge people. Begin each day with joy. These are all things we've learned before, most of them in kindergarten, but sometimes we need a little reminder. 

In my case, I needed the reminder to start my day with joy or at the very least, set the intention to make the day a joyful day. That's an easy habit to get out of because sometimes just reaching over to turn off the alarm is exhausting. Josephine's taken to curling up next to my head on the same side of the bed I crawl out of in the mornings. It is really remarkable how much that little dog can suddenly weigh or seal herself to the comforter. She knows instinctively that we both don't really want to go any where. This does not really set the intention for having a joyful day, more like setting the intention to take a nap later. This week, I've been making more of an effort. I roll over and turn off the alarm. Then I take a minute or two to snuggle the puppy before scooping her up and telling her that it is time to start our day. Her response is to jump off the bed and put her front paws up the wall by the door and stretching out long while tapping her paws on the wall. This is how we both start our day with a little bit of joy.

This week I am thankful for the reminder to not just find a little bit of joy during the day, but to start my day with it. I am thankful for the reminder to set the intention for happiness. It doesn't mean that things during the day don't irritate me or that the day even goes as I had planned. It matters that I started out with making the good intention. I am thankful for those short minutes of cuddle time with Josephine especially now that the weather has gotten colder. She's like a little furnace I can curl up around. I am thankful for moments of joy that arise from simply being mindful. The scooter rides this week have been brisk in the mornings, leaving my cheeks rosy, but I am grinning from ear to ear whenever I reach my destination. I am thankful for spritely 98 year old women who inspire me and give me hope that older doesn't mean decrepit. 

I am thankful for evening walks before the sun goes down. I am thankful for soup made with tomatoes I roasted from the garden. I am thankful for surprise artists that show up in my Pandora playlist like Joni Mitchell. I am thankful for you. Here's to a bright sparkly Fall weekend and super Thankful Friday!

THE CAT HAS FLEAS

By any other name

See this Instagram photo by @elephant_soap

Sometimes I really think I should be on drugs. I will fixate on something and worry it to death until I've spent all of my money trying to do something about the something or until I've chewed my lips off. Whichever comes first. Sometimes it all happens at the same time. Right now, I can feel the grooves I chewed into the inside of my cheeks while I was sleeping last night. But Cindy, you do all that yoga! No. No I don't. I mean, I could do more yoga. The meditation practice I started at the beginning of the year got derailed and yoga rarely happens for me on the weekend. Trust me when I say that the amount of yoga I do practice, keeps me from clawing the skin off of my body. 

This morning, before I called IKEA to check on the other half of our couch, I started to worry that they would have the chaise, but they wouldn't hold it for us. I started thinking that I should just leave work and go to IKEA and try to fit the chaise into my car (no way it would fit into my car). It really seemed like something I was going to have to do especially after spending over twenty minutes on hold. To get totally off track here, Josephine's been super itchy lately. She get's flea and tick medicine once a month and the groomer said that allergies where really bad right now for dogs. We've started adding fish oil to her food and rub her down with lavender oil each evening, but this morning I found fleas on my bed. So while I'm on hold with IKEA, I'm thinking about fleas and how I know they didn't come from Josephine. Albus has fleas and Michael and I are probably going to need body armor in order to put his flea medicine on his back. Even worse is that there are fleas. 

Let me go back to Josephine's itching problem because that's the beginning of my recent neurosis. Josephine is a schnauzer. Schnauzer are known for their itchy skin problems, yet I was on the verge of diagnosing my dog with scabies. I bought allergy wipes. I bought an anti-fungal spray. I bought lavender oil and fish oil and read all of the awful bad things on the internet. The fish oil and lavender oil are actually helping, but I was obsessed with solving this problem. She went to the groomer's and things have improved, but then the fleas. Except I know Josephine does not have fleas. I know it's that stupid cat who has the fleas and I'm going to completely obsess about it until I don't know when. When I'm not obsessing about fleas, I'm going to obsess about getting the rest of the couch together. Then I'm going to start freaking out over the cleanliness of the house because of fleas. I am one flea away from kleenex box shoes.

Of course, by the time it's taken me to write all of this, I've successfully put flea treatment on the cat by bribing him with a cat treat. IKEA pulled the chaise and had it on hold for Michael when he got there after work. We now have a complete couch (though I'm starting to rethink the cover...another story). Josephine was only a little itchy last night and I only found one flea, half dead on the couch throw. As per usual, my obsessive compulsive worrying is for naught. I know this, even while I'm playing out every possible scenario and outcome in my head and picking at my lip. I know that there's no reason for it. Oh, and guess what? I rode the scooter today and it looks like it's going to rain and I have a dentist appointment at lunch. So now, I've got a whole new list and I want to delete this entire entry because it sounds so complainy. 

Worrying about things going wrong is almost like wishing for things to go wrong. Things are going pretty right for me in this moment. That's usually when the voices start talking about how I shouldn't get used to things going right and start listing all the ways it could all go wrong. Just to make sure I'm listening, the voices will whisper "remember what happened the last time when everything was going right and you were super happy?" Except right now, I'm wondering how long do I have to remember that. How long do I have to remember cursing myself with saying out loud just how happy I was? I'm not saying that I need to forget. I'm saying that I need to change the language. I'm saying it's time to silence those voices. 

Today, I've decided that I never cursed myself by admitting to being happy. Today, I've decided to just let things be right.

NATIONAL DAY OF HAPPY

My tile. #aidswalkkc #onestepcloser

"My tile. #aidswalkkc #onestepcloser"

Did you know that Sunday was not only the first day of Spring, but the International Day of Happiness?!? Probably not. Let's face it; international happiness is not really on the top of the list of things being paid attention too. In fact most of the stuff getting all the attention right now are things that are the opposite of happiness. I awoke to news the other morning of terrorist attacks in Brussels and a particular Republican candidate (rhymes with rump) has already started flinging out racist hate. Because that's what he's best at. (Side note: Do you really want a President whose 'best' skill is being a racist fascist hate monger?) Finding happiness on a national level is turning into a Where's Waldo book. I apparently stopped looking for it weeks ago because that's when I stopped uploading a happiness picture into my VSCO ap. 

Things like International Days of Happiness make me question things. Am I happy? What do they mean by happy? Is it like happy 50% of the time or just more of a shrug with a general side of happy? How do you measure happiness? When people say they're happy are they being honest or is it just a polite answer to how they are doing? While I was typing all of this, I was also thinking about the layers of dust in my house and how I want to clean under the furniture. If you were to ask me, I'd say that happiness is directly proportional to how clean the house is. Please note that in the time it has taken me to write any of this, I have completely dusted the whole house including baseboards and ceiling fans. I did not however get under the furniture with a dust mop of any kind. I'm only one person. 

If I remember correctly, last year I had a hard time with that whole Winter to Spring transition. This time around though, I feel less disgruntled and more unsettled. I keep rushing forward to the next thing on the calendar without being still for the day I am currently on. This week I have had a chiropractor visit and I have a dentist appointment tomorrow. This is all scheduled around wash times and fix times and microscopy times. Next week I have an appointment for my yearly women's health exam and I still have to make an appointment with my general practitioner about the whole cholesterol thing. I have gone from hardly scheduled to over scheduled and I'm not sure how it even really happened. I have yet to schedule a time to get the side mirror fixed on the scooter so I can get it inspected because the tag is due. Nor have I scheduled an appointment for Josephine to have her yearly shots and exam. Then there's the car tag that's due, but I don't need an inspection for that because it's a fairly new car. And now I'm rambling and I haven't even mentioned the garden or the chickens. Every weekend we've planned to work in the garden or clean out the coop has been a cold miserable weekend. 

This is also a reason for my unsettled feeling. The weather. One day it's warm, like today. We may even get thunderstorms tonight. Then the next day will be cold. It's supposed to snow on Friday. I am as unsettled as the season, but am I happy? With all this unsettling I haven't really had time to think about it. On the actual National Day of Happy, I painted a tile for Mosaic, an AIDS Walk fundraiser. They sell the tiles at First Fridays and at the AIDS Walk. The Cabbage painted two and then Terry covered her hand in paint and pressed her hand to a tile. We all had a grand time for a good cause. In the moments when I wasn't worrying about how many paint brushes the Cabbage was using or all the paint cups she had placed next to her elbow, I can say that I was happy. I was so happy that I might even start taking a painting class at the studio. 

As soon as things are a little more settled. 

[Don't Forget to donate to my AIDS Walk page!]

LOVE THURSDAY

Scooters and ice cream.

"Scooters and ice cream."

I had a goodbye gathering for a coworker to go to on Monday after work which left Michael in charge of dinner. He'd picked out some lentil/poached egg dish that I could tell he regretted because I received a text shortly after I got to the bar that asked "Bela Napoli's?" I'm sure I've mentioned Bela Napoli's here before. Their pizzas are $5 on Mondays and their pizzas are the closest thing you'll get to actual Italy. I took my friend Jen here when she visited. Jen used to stay with her grandma in Italy ever summer. She ordered a pasta dish the night we went to Bela Napoli's and she looked at me with wide surprised eyes after her first bite and said "This tastes like Nona's!" I feel like that's a pretty good endorsement and on Monday nights, particularly when the weather is nice enough to sit outside, Bela Napoli's is the place to be. It was the place I always suggested when I was on the dating scene because, though the company may end up to be not ideal, I was sure to get a good meal. 

This is where I met Michael for our first date. I thought about that when he texted me about eating there that evening. Dates and time kind of blur together, but I had a vague idea that we were creeping up on an anniversary of sorts. June 10th. Almost two years ago. Monday night, as we sat eating our pizza, Michael said something about taking a trip to Italy. We have plans to tighten up the budget and maybe do Dave Ramsey's program when we get back from vacation. Our spending has gotten out of hand. Our reward for paying off all our credit cards is to save money for a trip to Italy. That night Michael said "I think we should each just have our own backpack and that we should rent scooters to ride all over Italy." He didn't know that this was a thing on my Life List, that I wanted to ride scooters all over Italy. I looked away and out the window when he said it. I don't know why, but I didn't want him to see how this idea made me so happy. Then he spent the rest of the evening trying to read my mind.  

All I could think in that moment was how dang happy I was. I was so happy that I thought I'd burst into a million bubbles. Ridiculously happy. Filled to the brim happy. And it made me pause. When I'm looking for a certain photo in my Flickr archives, I hardly ever go back to the time before Chris died because I can see in those pictures just how happy we were together and I can't take it. We were Bonnie and Clyde, Desi and Lucy, Abbott and Costello.  I remember that first summer in Kansas City and how I blubbered all over Brene Brown about how happy we were and we were, or at least I was, unbelievably happy then. I am tentative to let myself be that happy again for so many reasons. It's not fair for me to be this happy. I am not deserving of such happiness. I want to tell Chris that I'm sorry for being so happy even though he's not here. I want to tell Chris I am not sorry for being so happy despite the fact that he is not here. I am slightly terrified of being ridiculously happy. Look what happened the last time. We have all of these self help books dealing with happiness and finding happiness, but nothing about having your happiness and owning it.

Be prepared for disappointment. How many of us heard this and heard it often growing up? Your life will be a series of mediocre moments with mediocre events. You will go to school. You will get a job, probably a house and a family and you will be happy enough; emphasis on enough. We are programmed to believe that there is contentment and somewhat happiness, but nothing more. And when we do find that there is more, that  more than happy enough is possible, we don't have a clue as to how to handle it. No one told us to be prepared for overwhelming joy and happiness. No one warned you that there would be times when joy would flow into you so fast that it will squeeze your heart until tears leak out your eyes. Only spiritual gurus experience such overwhelming joy and happiness, not the regular every person. In fact, the God I was raised on wouldn't want me to ever have that kind of happiness. It is decadent and sinful. 

Life is filled with disappointment and since I was prepared so thoroughly for it, disappointments have become the mediocre event. I've got them. I know how they work. I know loss and pain and heartache. Those are easy. A piece of fucking cake. I can say goodbye, shed a few tears and move on better than anyone.  At one point I thought I did happiness pretty well too. It took some time to get there. I had to practice to be mindful of those moments, but eventually I thought I could relish in those moments of bliss. I could look around and exclaim "Holy Goats! Look how stupid happy we are!!!" with out blinking an eye. I didn't learn how to do that early enough in life and I'm still in class learning. That shattering end to the last ridiculously happy moment shook my confidence. So if you were to have asked me a few months ago, even a few days ago if I was happy, my reply would have been "I'm happy enough." even though it is a diminished answer of the truth. 

If you were to ask me today if I am happy, my reply would be "Yes. Yes, I am ridiculously happy."

LOVE THURSDAY

A while back, sometime between Christmas and the New Year, there was a day where the temperatures were tolerable outside, but the sky was overcast. A dirty white blanket rested over the city. I took a break from my work to walk over to the Kauffman Memorial Gardens with my camera. The day seemed to be lacking in color what with leafless trees and the brown grass of winter. So I set my camera to black and white thinking that this would be a good exercise in photography. Except as I crossed the street to get to the gardens, I looked up to see these trees at the entrance covered in bright red berries. The trees lined the stone wall of the garden and like all the other trees, these guys were devoid of leaves. All the starkness of the cold stone wall and the dead winter ground made the berries seem more than red.

They were a surprise. I had set my expectations to see black and white. I wasn't even going to try to see colors that day. I knew that there were still Christmas decorations up and there was a lovely wreath on one side of the wall, but because of the overcast sky it all just seemed dull. The tinsel and ribbons had faded and I didn't really give much of a glance to it. I was looking for shadows and contrast and the hold outs of Christmas decor just didn't catch my eye. Yet here were these bright red berries. Enticing. Looking easily like something to be plucked and eaten, though I'm sure they are not to be eaten by humans any way. 

A recent MRI study by the University College of London found that  "happiness depends not on how well things are going but whether things are going better or worse than expected." When I stepped outside that day with my camera, I had very low expectations. The day was dreary and flat. The lighting was not ideal. I just wanted to be outside for a bit and taking my camera for a walkabout seemed as good as an excuse as any even if I was sure that I would not be taking any frame worthy photos. But when I turned to cross the street and saw the pop of red, my heart lifted. There is a happiness movement that has swept the country. I have fallen for it myself with my own daily happiness project. There is such a push to be happy and if you try all kinds of activities and you're still not happy, here's a pill that will make you happy. I think there are times we look and try too hard. Instead of being happy, why not just be? Let the happy find you for change. Let the happy surprise you. 

Happy Love Thursday.